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Ali almost never broke his hand in the ring.
The one time he punched someone outside the ring – no gloves – his hand broke.
So gloves protect the boxer.
And because they are tight around the wrists, they also prevent the wrists from breaking)

But gloves do protect the opponent.
Because gloves have a bigger surface area, the impact is vastly reduced.
(Also why some martial bare-knuckle martial arts don’t clench their fists.
But just bend the fingers)

In 1842, the British government passed a law banning women and children under 10 from working underground in coal mines.

A commission into children’s safety in the mines was called when a flood killed 26 of them. However, it wasn’t safety concerns that got the law passed – which is the natural assumption for us to make, and it’s what most kids learn in school.

The head of the commission, Lord Ashley, knew that parliament and the public wouldn’t care about poor kids in remote parts of the country dying.

So he focused his report on something that nobody would never consider today, because it would seem completely trivial.

Conditions in the mines were sweltering hot and both men and women worked partially naked.

When Victorian society was made aware of this, there was a moral outrage and the act passed overnight.

As a child growing up during the Cold War I always believed that the USSR (Union of the Soviet Socialist Republic) was a Communist state. It was pumped into our brains by the press. Red Ted, Arthur Scargill and the Miner’s strikes, especially of you read the Daily Mail or the Express. One day I had a conversation with my wife about this when she asked me why all the tube drivers were striking in London. She thought it was most odd and told me this would never happen in Russia. I laughed and said “Well you Communists should know all about strikes didn’t the idea of striking originate from you?.” She replied “No, in my country if someone strikes the Police come out and send them all back to work or they get sacked”. I said “But your country is where the Trades Unions idea and Communism came from surely?” Again she said: “No, we have never been a Communist country. Communism was an ideal, The idea that we would not use money came from Karl Marx and Lenin but we never achieved it. We were always a Socialist state where the state provided for the most important things but we have always used some form of currency.